Kinky and Knotless: The History of African American Hair Discrimination in America

• In Event: Blackness, Beauty, Body Imaging, and Becoming

Abstract

The care and maintenance of African American hair is not just a process of shampoo, condition, and style. It is coupled with community, ambition, desire, freedom, protest, and capitalism. The roots of African American people’s hair have been both a place of conflict and space of resistance. Since emancipation, African American’s have styled their hair to embrace their cultural identity, assimilate into American ideals of appropriateness, visually voice their political views, and further assert their pride in relationship to their Blackness. Finger waves, bantu knots, jheri curls, afros, locs, lace fronts, and braids are all significant to African American people’s cultural expression. Despite their efforts and persistence, this freedom of cultural expression has not been fully protected and thus, African Americans have also suffered from such expressions.
On March 18, 2022, the House of Representatives signed a piece of legislation called the C.R.O.W.N. Act which prohibits race-based hair discrimination. Employers and educational institutions are therefore barred from denying employment or access to educational opportunities to individuals based on their hair. While hair may seem to be of trivial concern in discussions of advancing equity, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), our current anti-discrimination laws are still inadequate for addressing hair bias.
This is a first draft project which aims to use visual materials, scholarly sources, court case documents, and interviews to discuss (1) hair’s importance to African Americans' identities; (2) the negative impacts on hair/race-based discrimination on African American’s educational and wealth attainment, and (3) the necessity of the C.R.O.W.N. Act as an additional federal Civil Rights protection.

Author

• W. Denae Powell, University of Houston